The Kirkstone Pass connecting Ambleside to Patterdale inspired in William Wordsworth ‘thoughts and feelings of many walks in all weathers, by day and night’.
Photograph: Paul Bettison/Getty Images

On the old hillside road linking Grasmere and Ambleside, above Windermere, stands a gate that “time out of mind”, as William Wordsworth put it, has been called the Wishing Gate.

This month, while cheering crowds below lined the route of the Tour of Britain cycle race, there were few tourists who made the trip up to see this unimposing wooden gate.

Now, in a response to the recent re-establishment of “Brontë Land” on the other side of the Pennines, Wordsworth is leading a comeback for Cumbrian literary tourism, reminding visitors that if it was not for his work, and that of his fellow Lakeland Poets, we might never have felt so strongly about one of England’s most dramatic natural landscapes.

The Wishing Gate, alongside dozens of other locations, is a key element of a drive to revive literary tourism in the Lake District by reminding visitors of the places that inspired Wordsworth, the area’s most famous son. His 1828 poem about the dreamy view from a gate on this site celebrates the superstitious human habit of making wishes. A troubled visiting “worldling” in search of good luck, he suggests, “Might stop before this favoured scene, / At Nature’s call, nor blush to lean /Upon the Wishing Gate …”

To pinpoint these Wordsworthian “spots in time” an online guide has been created to map and explain the landmarks and vantage points that shaped some of the best-known verses in the English language. The Wordsworth Trust initiative, which boldly brings back the 19th-century promotional phrase “Wordsworth Country”, may also help to protect and restore several of these literary landmarks.

“We want people to think of it as Wordsworth Country again,” said Paul Kleian, communications head at the trust. “After all, it was while he was here, and living in Grasmere in particular, that he had his incredibly productive eight-year period from 1799, producing and revising works like the Lyrical Ballads, The Recluse and The Prelude.”

Before the romantic works of Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey had extolled the beauty of mists rolling down deserted crags, the uninhabited wildernesses of the north were widely regarded as grim.

“When Wordsworth came back to the Lakes to write it was at a time when the European grand tour had become rather too dangerous, due to the aftermath of revolution and the rise of Napoleon,” said Kleian. “This area was suddenly the best place to come for adventure.”

The trust’s new web guide puts lines of poetry alongside vintage tourist illustrations to celebrate 42 locations closely associated with the poet’s works and offers tourists fresh destinations to rival his former homes, Dove Cottage and Rydal Mount, or the banks of Ullswater, where he once famously “wandered lonely as a cloud” and saw “a host of golden daffodils”.

The app might take you, for instance, to Patterdale, where Wordsworth wrote of the “wild stream Of Aira”, the waterfall known as Aira Force that flows down a hidden ravine.

For the team at the Wordsworth Trust, however, the most important issue is the preservation of public access to places that influenced the poet. Their latest tourist push does, all the same, coincide with final efforts to put together a case for World Heritage status for the region in 2017 and with preparations for Wordsworth’s 250th birthday celebrations in 2020, which are being supported by a Heritage Lottery Fund grant of almost £5m.

Wordsworth, whose parents had both died by the time he was a teenager, was born in Cockermouth in 1770 and went to boarding school in Hawkshead. After university in Cambridge, he toured revolutionary Europe and then set up home briefly in the West Country with his sister Dorothy, where he met Coleridge, his collaborator on their early popular volume, the Lyrical Ballads.

On a walking tour back in his native Lake District, Wordsworth stumbled across a former pub in Grasmere, which, renamed Dove Cottage, became a home for him, his sister, his wife Mary Hutchinson, and their children. The neighbouring building now houses the Wordsworth Trust and original manuscripts including Dorothy’s pivotal journal, a record of their many walks.

All the key Wordsworth buildings appear on the app, but the emphasis is on the landscape and the poems.

“Some of the details are still disputed,” said Jeff Cowton, the longstanding curator at the Wordsworth Trust, “but we welcome the debate. The old tour guides sometimes get it wrong. People in Hawkshead tend to believe the childhood boat-stealing incident recalled in The Prelude happened at neighbouring Esthwaite Water, but since Wordsworth writes that he did not know the lake well, it may well have been Ullswater.” (“One summer evening (led by her) I found / A little boat tied to a willow tree / Within a rocky cove, its usual home. / Straight I unloosed her chain, and stepping in / Pushed from the shore …”)

Cowton admits there is similar disagreement about the “famous brook” mentioned in the same poem. Once an “unruly child of mountain birth” it has been “boxed” by the town and “Stripped of his voice and left to dimple down”. It is normally thought to be in Flag Street, Hawkshead, near Wordsworth’s lodgings, but Cowton suspects it was in the next village, Colthouse, where the young Wordsworth also stayed.

Visitors to Dove Cottage this autumn can see entertaining evidence of the poet’s impact on British tourism in a special exhibition. It charts the growing interest in the scenery of the Lakes and in the Romantic sensibility. From 1820 Wordsworth was esteemed enough for tourists to come to the area armed with books of his poetry. The brazen even knocked on his door.

After his death in 1850 a popular guidebook, Through Wordsworth Country, was published and over the next 80 years this term, alongside “Wordsworthshire”, was commonly used on railway posters and road signs and in travel brochures. But in 1973 when the names of Cumberland and Westmorland were finally superseded by Cumbria, all the old signs were taken down. So the trust is keen to hear from anyone who has a surviving example.

If the campaign to reignite the Wordsworth flame ahead of 2020 succeeds, the “moss-grown bar” of Wordsworth’s Wishing Gate may soon be crowded with “strangers from afar”.

A view over Windermere in autumn. Photograph: Adam Burton/Getty Images/Robert Harding World Imagery

SOURCES OF INSPIRATION

Esthwaite WaterWordsworth went to school in Hawkshead near this lake and went there before lessons: “Morning walks/Were early before the hours of school/I travelled round our little lake, five miles/Of pleasant wandering.”

WindermereThe lake appears often in his work. In The Prelude he writes: “When summer came,/Our pastime was, on bright halfholidays,/To sweep along the plain of Windermere/With rival oars ...”

GrasmereThe location of Dove Cottage. He rhapsodises about it in The Recluse: “On Nature’s invitation do I come,/By Reason sanctioned. Can the choice mislead,/That made the calmest, fairest spot on earth,/With all its unappropriated good,/My own.”

SkiddawA Wordsworth sonnet is addressed to Skiddaw and in his poem At the Grave of Burns, Wordsworth says: “Huge Criffel’s hoary top ascends/By Skiddaw seen,/Neighbours we were, and loving friends/We might have been.”

Emma’s DellA favourite haunt described in Poems on the Naming of Places. Of these lines the poet wrote: “This poem was suggested on the banks of the brook that runs through Easdale, which is in some parts of its course as wild and beautiful as brook can be. I have composed thousands of verses by the side of it.”

Rydal WaterA view from the southeastern end of the lake shows the island, site of The Wild Duck’s Nest, Nab Cottage and the path over White Moss Common by the Leech Gatherer’s pool to Grasmere. “Like a fair sister of the sky,/Unruffled doth the blue lake lie,/The mountains looking on.”

The Swan Inn, GrasmereWordsworth, Southey, and Sir Walter Scott climbed Helvellyn together from here. “The place to Benjamin right well/Is known, and by as strong a spell/As used to be that sign of love/And hope – the Olive-Bough and Dove;/He knows it to his cost, good Man!/Who does not know the famous Swan? ...”